Growing Up Queer in Australia

by Benjamin Law

  Matt said his favourite quote from the Bible was ‘Rejoice in thy youth’. He liked to skateboard and play rugby and have shiny cadet boots. He liked the idea of being popular, one of the boys. They would go off together on ‘missions from God’. Later, he told me they hid the marijuana under my wardrobe because nobody would suspect me. I was the straight and narrow one – it was an appearance I wore like armour, with intellectual walls and drawbridges.

  The housemaster told us one day when we were arguing with each other that we were like a married couple. We fought about God (he was an atheist) and politics (he was a republican). On the last day of school, Matt played Pink Floyd’s The Wall and I blasted Handel’s ‘Zadok the Priest’ across the school oval. On breaks for exam study, we chased each other around the house, emptied the fire extinguisher at each other, broke furniture, threw (surprisingly painful) apricots at each other, and wrestled in the corridor. We watched Gallipoli over and over because we had to for English, and afterwards we listened to Albinoni’s ‘Adagio in G Minor’ together in the dark of his room.

  People like Matt make friends easily, as if everyone falls in love with them for possessing something they themselves lack. He told me once that he had had a girlfriend in Canberra, that she had thrown herself out of a moving car. I decided, without thinking about the implications, that I would do anything for him. I still thought vaguely that there was a girl out there for me, someone like Helena Bonham Carter in A Room with a View – an aloof mystery – but at the school disco I didn’t want to dance near anyone except my best friend to ‘I Wanna Be Your Lover’ and ‘Total Eclipse of the Heart’. I was Lucy Honeychurch, and Matt was the screaming boy in the tree who was questioning everything I thought I was.

  But instead of talking about love, we studied The Outsider and Richard III, their questions ones of philosophy or politics. I didn’t mind being nerdy – I thought that ideas really mattered, that there was nothing higher. I avoided sports and the gym, because I told myself I could never be or have anything like that – glimpses of bodies and snippets of locker-room banter posed a threat I couldn’t yet name. I looked down on the Greek–Australian boys who painted cocks in Wite-Out on the lockers. ‘Faggot’ was their ultimate term of abuse, but I didn’t attach such a crude word to myself. I was too busy standing out for different reasons – each difference a disguise. I argued in school essays that there is no such thing as race, but I couldn’t get away from being in between, and yet defined by, those alien moulds. I chose all my battles out of defiance and called it loyalty – to the old Queen, to Reason, to ideals of God and of platonic romance too pure to be attained.

  *

  When Matt’s father calls to tell me his son has died of a heroin overdose, I’m back at home in the country for the holidays, a long way from anywhere. I cry and my mum cries too. She tells me a story about a girlfriend she had at school with whom she felt really close. She’s dropping hints or invitations to talk, but I don’t want to talk about myself. When someone dies like that, everyone’s grief is deepened by some form of guilt.

  Matt’s father pays for my flight to attend the funeral and, for reasons I don’t fully understand, I have a place among the family. They say they know how much he meant to me, but I can’t imagine that they do. Someone tells me Matt had a boyfriend, but I never see him. There’s a girl in black carrying red roses at the casket. I don’t see his body, but I imagine it lying there, drained of colour and hope. His uncle delivers a sermon about the evils of drugs and the waste of a young life. Matt wasn’t yet twenty-one. I’m angry. It feels like a lecture that says nothing about my friend, or of the things I remember about him.

  I get up to speak, but all the words I want to say disappear. Am I really allowed to say how much I loved him?

  Twenty years later, although I have loved, lost and gained so much more in that time than my old headmaster could’ve imagined, I still feel the burden of that silence.

  homosexual

  Mike Mullins

  I don’t relate to the word ‘queer’. ‘Gay’ has never sat comfortably with me either. Perhaps I’m just old-fashioned, but I’ve always been most relaxed with the word ‘homosexual’.

  Growing up in a small town in Australia is challenging for anyone who is different. Especially when you are born in 1951 and your world is the monoculture that was Australia in the post-war years. It is doubly challenging when you are a male child who hates playing sport and displays a creative flair for doing things in his own unique way.

  The Rock in New South Wales was established as a railway town in the later part of the nineteenth century, when the first steps were being taken to bring together the separate colonies into one nation. Down the road in the Victorian town of Glenrowan, the Kelly gang was blazing a trail of mythological proportions, the iconic Bulletin magazine was in its embryonic years, and many of the artists and writers and performers who thrived at the time – Mary Gilmore, Henry Lawson, Nellie Melba, and the painters Arthur Streeton, Tom Roberts and Fred McCubbin – captured a very romantic view of Australia. In 1883, the Sydney-to-Melbourne railway line officially opened – for the first time you could travel between the two cities by train. A railway engineer who took the route observed, ‘There were no townships touched between Wagga and Albury, and the country is but thinly populated.’ It wasn’t until March 1885 that The Rock was proclaimed. The name was controversial as the township’s station was originally called ‘Hanging Rock’, but the rock in question had actually fallen ten years earlier. So it became, simply, ‘The Rock’. I was staggered to discover that the town had only been established sixty-six years before I was born.

  My school years at The Rock were challenging, and few memories from that time can be recalled with fondness or nostalgia. According to a former teacher I was an effeminate child, which made me an easy target for bullying.

  The playground was a place of torture. I dreaded recess and the seemingly endless lunch period in particular. The negative attention from the boys was relentless: regular rituals of ganging up on me, calling me nasty names and much worse. I have no idea whether my teachers were aware of this or felt any responsibility to deal with it. This was the 1950s, when a man had to be a man and if things were tough, you had to learn to toughen up.

  These attacks also went beyond the boundaries of the school. On the way home, I was often stoned and bashed and my bike was frequently thrown into the creek. I remember on one occasion being held down by one of the boys while the others pissed on me. The culture that many now call ‘toxic masculinity’ reigned supreme at The Rock during my childhood.

  One day the headmaster caught me walking hand in hand with a fellow student who I’ll call Johnny. It was not sexual. Johnny was the only male student who I became friends with during the late primary-school years. He was the son of a farmer, but I don’t remember why we connected. The next day, at the school assembly, the headmaster called us both up in front of the entire school and forced us to walk hand in hand. The kids screamed with laughter and the humiliation was intense. Johnny never associated with me again and I think that this was the day we both lost our innocence. Our childhood concluded. The message was clear: men don’t touch each other except in formal handshakes and in contact sports.

  More and more, I retreated to the company of girls. I felt safe in their presence – a refuge from the toxicity of the schoolyard. All of this changed, of course, when puberty arrived and the boys started sniffing around the girls. My presence was suddenly unwelcome to both genders.

  Away from school, in the safety of our backyard and in the company of the neighbourhood kids, were more positive experiences. The creek that runs through the town was frequently dry and an exotic place to play: curved sheets of tin became slides down the grassy slopes; curves in the dry creek bed became battlegrounds for games of Cowboys and Indians; scaling fallen trees made for epic adventures; and the native birds provided a rich soundtrack to it all. Life at The Rock was not all negative.

  My first
sexual experience arrived with an unexpected visit from an older boy in the neighbourhood. He wanted to know if I had done ‘it’. The enquiry was about masturbation (commonly referred to as ‘wanking’ or ‘jerking’), and he was eager to show me the way when my answer was ‘No, what is it?’ This was not a homosexual act; there is no doubt in my mind that all he was doing was exploring and sharing the newly discovered capacities of his cock.

  The games at the creek changed when testosterone became the driver. A couple of generous girls were happy to share their bodies with a group of us fellas on the banks of the creek, but it soon became apparent to me that I was more interested in watching the blokes in action.

  My sexual life became very secretive. Suddenly, there was a compelling reason to be among the boys and some, who had so ruthlessly harassed me when I was younger, now found my company convenient. That convenience had its rules and restrictions and under no circumstances could it be discussed with anyone – including the boys themselves, until there was a need to catch up again. I enjoyed these clumsy sexual encounters and, in some ways, I think now I yearn a little for the purity of those first experiences. These days, sex has long lost its innocence.

  Beyond the physical pleasures of these encounters was another, more complex dimension, which was a desire to be accepted. It would take a further five decades to fully understand the intricacies of that particular ache, its connection to my deeply entrenched anxiety and its associated fear of rejection. But in some small way in those early encounters, my tormentors accepted me and with that came a hint of empowerment and the beginnings of my life as a homosexual man.

  In late 2014, I suffered a nervous breakdown. Triggered by a series of workplace bullying incidents, which had nothing to do with my sexuality, one day I started to shake uncontrollably. It wouldn’t stop. These circumstances led to my resignation from the job and a period of intense therapy. It turned out to be the best thing that could have happened to me. I had long avoided dealing with the many issues that had influenced and informed who I was. In the therapeutic process I discovered that I was born an anxious person, due to the circumstances of my birth-mother. It’s now been clinically proven that if a woman is stressed and anxious during pregnancy, it has an effect on the unborn child, predisposing them to anxiety. Being a young Catholic girl in 1951, pregnant out of wedlock, must have been extremely stressful. The stigma of unwanted pregnancies in those days was brutal, so she had no option but to give her child up for adoption.

  I spent eighteen months with my psychiatrist, deconstructing my life. The circumstances of my birth, a childhood with a violent, alcoholic father and the toxicity of my school years were just the beginning. Having been a homosexual in Australia during the ’60s and ’70s brought a whole set of issues as well. Homosexuality was not only illegal in those days, but also seen as a human deficiency, in terms of both masculinity and mental health. I confronted all of this (and more) as we unpacked the jigsaw of my life, piece by piece.

  When the therapy was finished, I was a new person. For the first time in my life I became very confident about my sexuality. At sixty-five years of age I suddenly became a highly active sexual being. I acquired a contemporary haircut, started to go to the gym six days a week, lost 20 kilograms, pierced my ears and had a tattoo inked on my left arm. My friends would ask, ‘Is this the new Mike?’ My answer was succinct: ‘No, this is the Mike that always was but until now has never been allowed to be.’

  In 2018, I watched the live broadcast of the Australian parliament passing the same-sex marriage legislation. When the strong contingent of advocates in the visitors’ gallery broke into song with a rendition of ‘I Am Australian’, I started to cry.

  I sobbed uncontrollably for forty minutes. I couldn’t stop. The tears came from deep inside and they were cathartic.

  Afterwards, I wondered: why did I cry like that? The answer was simple: as an adult, for nearly fifty years, I had felt a lesser person, a sub-citizen, an inferior man.

  Suddenly – finally – that was all gone.

  A Robust Game of Manball

  Patrick Lenton

  At the University of Wollongong, in the school of creative writing, as I learnt about particularly sick short stories, about the wildest of rhymed stanzas, about the loosest literary philosophers, I also learnt about other, just as important, things: friendship, the dangers of trying too hard, and the inherent stupidity of masculinity and men.

  Creative Writing was a weird degree in both purpose and setup: a tight-knit collection of around twenty to thirty students who were just keen as shit about sentences. You know the old army maxim of ‘put ’em through hell together?’ Well, Creative Writing kind of worked on the opposite notion – put them through something truly absurd and useless and fun like studying creative writing, and they’ll bond through the shared realisation that they’ll never get a job or earn any money.

  One weekend, it was announced that a bunch of the girls in our friendship circle would forgo the usual pleasure of smashing cheap jugs at the North Gong or drinking boxes of goon in someone’s sharehouse, or crashing one of the actors’ interminable house parties, to have a ‘no men’ night. I supported the notion in theory – men are pretty terrible, and it’s nice for everyone who doesn’t identify as a man to have some peace. However, this left me alone with the dudes. A lone wilting queer flower in a garden of boys who wouldn’t feel comfortable comparing themselves to flora. Admittedly, nobody in a creative writing degree was overtly masculine – more poetry-reading effetes than football-throwing bros – but it was still upsetting. I assumed I’d have to listen to jazz.

  I used to see my inability to relate to men and their communities as a fault on my part, a deficit. I saw their scorn of me and my obvious queerness and nerdery and fluttery weirdness as something wrong with me. I used to attempt to think of ways to fit in, like the time I pretended to have a favourite type of truck.

  So, on the ‘no men’ night, rather than simply enduring a nightmarish evening of high testosterone, of shouted arguments about the relative merits of lit bros like Hemingway or Bukowski, of cheap beer and posturing, I thought I’d try to lean in and experience a true boys’ night. I didn’t know exactly what a boys’ night was precisely, but I had grand dreams of using my organisational skills to foster a deep rapport, a raw emotional masculine truth, like when men go out into the woods and shoot things or rip copper out of the earth or round up cattle on a lonely mountain – I realised I was thinking of Brokeback Mountain. You never know: perhaps I was actually a man’s man, but I’d just never had any male friends to test the theory out on.

  Consequently, with great excitement, I put together a party-planning team to organise the first ever Creative Writing boys’ night out. We called it ‘Mandate’. My friend Anna actually came up with most of the good ideas. Why was Anna there? Who knows. Why was Anna anywhere?

  Mandate had everything – the slogan was ‘mandate, get it in ya’, which Anna printed on super cute buttons to give to all the participants. We created a signature cocktail for the event. We made canapés, we decorated the random sharehouse we were in with streamers and lights, we even made a playlist (‘It’s Raining Men’, sung by Geri Halliwell, twenty-three times in a row).

  Strangely, despite getting a great turnout, the party first stuttered and then failed to launch. Our guests milled awkwardly in the immaculately decorated living room, seemingly too on-edge from my highly curated fun to sit down and relax. The more alcohol that got pumped into the room, the more somnolent and slow the conversation became. A cute boy I was trying to flirt with kept calling up girls at the other party and pleading to join them.

  I was pissed off. Somehow, as the night progressed, my failing mandate morphed into a competition. I could only imagine what the non-men event was up to, but I was convinced that it was fun and frivolous and everything my shitty party was not. I gathered the party-planning committee, and tried to brainstorm ideas.

  ‘Drugs,’ said Lachie. ‘Pranks,’
said Anna. But then, in a flash of genius, I realised that what they needed was the opposite of what I wanted. All I had to do was think of my worst party scenario: men would be sure to love it.

  ‘Mandate,’ I announced loudly, interrupting literally no conversation. ‘It’s time to play sport. It’s time for . . . Manball.’

  We traipsed to a local sports field (well, everyone except Anna, who decided to stay behind and organise an undetermined prank).

  There was a Friday Night Lights aura to the evening now, the big lights filling us with vigour and patriotism, the hot night making us boisterous and rough. There was jostling and hooting and the loud hyena cackles of the young at night, and while normally I’d hate every part of that nonsense, now I was just thrilled, grinning in the darkness. Yes, my simple boys, I thought, we’re all in cahoots now, my stupid man-babies.

  Having never played or watched a sport in my life, it took some time to develop the rules of Manball. As far as anyone can remember, there were two opposing sides, a sack of goon and a lot of running and pushing. If you’d told me before that night that a bunch of pretentious philosophy students and book nerds and power-Goths would spend their evening running and strategising and pouring goon over themselves while taking a victory lap, I would have spat in your face. But, against all odds, Manball worked. Even I was running, all hysterical and red-faced and boisterous, like a sugared-up toddler at the beach.

  Maybe I had been missing out, I thought. Maybe my dislike and fear of men and their activities was something limiting, a fragment from another time. If we kept Mandate inclusive and open to everyone – not just men – maybe I’d grow to love things like physical activity and being interrupted when I talk. As I was thinking this, I watched a boy named Dane bounding along with the goon sack – like a newborn gazelle, all flying tongue and big hooves until he slipped and smacked his beautiful noggin against a tap, knocking himself out instantly.